Cracks of Their Togetherness
by False Ammunition
Summary: "She stands separate in her own home, red-handed and uncaught." There's Mark and Addison and Derek, and then there's Amy. FMS-prompted, so debatably dark. Disclaimer: I don't own them. I just wish I did.


**Cracks of Their Togetherness**

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_A/N: Amy, when she was Amy the first time._

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"Mark, you'll come, right?"

The redhead is draped all over her brother, languid and loving; later Amy would learn it was a pathetic pretence propagated after witnessing her doctor daddy drive into a careless woman with a vigour Amy's father hadn't possessed even before he died. She suspects there's something Freudian in that, but doesn't bother to pursue it.

Heavier in her mind is the knowledge that she pictures her brother's face when other boys are attaching themselves to various parts of her body. Or – she supposes he's not really her brother, doesn't share her blood, that metallic taste of inferiority where her teeth sink into flesh when she screams around a mouthful of arm, her brother's arm, one father pooling in that same taste, gunshot still ringing. It left a more intangible but no less real wound inside her, some metaphorical black hole that would suck her in.

She catches Mark's eye but he chooses to ignore the indignant glint under a fan of dark eyelashes. One boisterous "sure!" to sting her ears. He's big and enjoyable and his presence fills the prayer circle as the threesome intertwine, fingers laced, hands curling around waists, arms slung over shoulders; his presence bleeds through the cracks of their togetherness and seeps into Amy's palms, coating them with an excess of faux happiness. She stands separate in her own home, red-handed and uncaught.

They all breeze past her, stumbling, giggling, halfway to drunken and intent.

"Mark," she catches his arm, soaks her words with helplessness, gazes up at him with pleading eyes. "Can I sleep in your bed tonight?"

Mark's teeth bare, half-grin, half-grimace, and his eyes shift to AddisonandDerek who are too busy pressing against each other to hear; his relief shows.

"Not tonight," he murmurs, that Mark whisper so low it sends reverberations through her bones. But it's special, she wants to argue. Safe. It's their thing, when Derek is at Addison's, when they're all home for the holidays. A rare indulgence for the little sister, wrapped up in his old rocket ship sheets.

_Three, two, one,_ she'll murmur, when she can hear his footsteps approaching in the hall, that tell-tale creak in the floorboards. The comfort of being able to tell one family member's footfall from another's. She squeezes her eyes shut, feigns little soft snoring noises as he hovers over, feels the weight of his guilt sliding down her chest and settling between her thighs. He'll bend down to scoop her up – _blast off_ – rough hands gathering her rag doll limbs in his embrace and transferring her to Derek's bunk.

"But Mark," she begins, insides swirling with something strangely unpleasant but all too comforting. He cuts her off, palm holding her head still as he drops a kiss on her forehead like she's a little girl, utters his condolences before sauntering off with his lesser thirds.

The door closes behind them and an emptiness envelops her again. Her mother is cluttering around in the kitchen, a second marriage. Amy starts up the stairs and they creak under her body (fourteen years and it still surprises her to hear it) like they're both hundred-year-old lovers with leftover intimacy that's more work than it's worth.

She's still thinking this when she slips into her brothers' room, closes the door behind her gently, though she could slam it and it wouldn't make a difference. She flops back onto the rocket ship sheets, splays her arms wide, exhales as loudly as she can. Then she's looking for his cigarettes, bedside table, rifling through condoms, earplugs, a collection of her childhood letters written to him that make her smile to see, kept.

She finds them under a well-thumbed medical journal, lights up, doesn't open a window. She watches herself smoking in the full-length mirror. She likes how much longer she's getting, likes the way her near-black hair frames her ghostly pallor. She tries for smoke rings, coughs, tries again. She stares and stares at her reflection, hips tilted forward, biting on the ring finger of her cigarette hand. Doesn't she look sophisticated? Doesn't she?

She strolls around the room then, running a finger over all their belongings, registering the titles of books that have surrounded her all her life and opening drawers to reveal neatly-folded shirts and jeans. What kind of boy folds like that? Furthermore, what kind of boy lets his best friend's mom fold like that for him?

She thinks she knows. She thinks she sees layers in Mark that no one will ever acknowledge. She sees the vulnerability, the guilt, the sympathy – ugly things that rouse her insides and ignite her brain cells. _She_ gets him.

And then her fingers are tangling in black lace, all fancy décor and transparencies that lovers will choose not to see through. She always found it odd how transparency could be a woman's greatest disguise – and she counted herself among these women, of course.

She removes every item of clothing before stepping daintily into her treasure – _finders keepers, losers weepers, _she hears Nancy sneering, that day she and her sisters had found their mother's once-loved emerald ring in the flowerbeds, the day Derek brought Addison home for the first time.

She covers her breasts with both hands and tilts her head at her reflection. They suit her, she decides. She looks experienced and wise: worthy. Then she kicks her discarded clothes into a corner, stretches elegantly into Mark's AC/DC shirt, climbs into his bed and pops her thumb in her mouth (another secret Mark would keep for her until the habit would ebb away and be replaced with something perhaps less Freudian – or perhaps more).

When she wakes up to sunlight spilling into the room, she's cold and it's still empty. She thinks that, across town, three med students are probably still sleeping in an amalgamation of drunkenness and affection, inappropriateness overlapping with desire.

She sneaks away with her lace and doesn't say anything when her brothers return, only offers the redhead an incomprehensible laugh when she asks how Amy's doing over Thanksgiving dinner.

They don't physically abandon her that night, but everyone curls up in the lounge, praise-softened mother, too many sisters, complicated brothers-in-law and an abundance of nieces and nephews; her brother. Addison. Mark. They watch black-and-white movies with popcorn and anecdotal commentaries, the whole sickeningly sweet ordeal.

Amy disappears with handfuls of resentment and no one calls after her. She lights her first cigarette in four days – finally, some peace – and blows the reflection of her bad consumption out the window this time, into winter-crisp cleanliness. She stubs it out on her arm.

Then begins her customary burglary. Condoms, books, a bottle of Jack – what a stupid place to hide it. In Mark's sheets she finds boxers, worn. She sneaks a glance at the door before tucking them beneath the waistband of her leggings, yanking her sweater down to hide the bump.

_Yeah, I'm on the pill,_ she could tell them, as they slide into her, unprotected and unharmed. _Yeah, we're fine_. Slowly matching childish grunts with vigorous kicks from within her – more vigorous than Amy had ever felt, even before she died, picked up the pill, swallowed death.

Her fantasy is disrupted by a slightly more garish discovery – red panties this time. Crimson. _Silk._ They're so soft they feel like slippery liquid temptation between her fingers. Amy whimpers with longing. And then notices it, on her fingers at first – the real temptation.

She drags the damp undergarments over her thighs, admires them for all of ten seconds before gathering her oh-so-adult riches about her person and heading for her room.

This time, she leaves behind her own deliciousness, a little transparency, a symptom for them to diagnose: her own cotton pair, wet with uninnocence, resting like a silenced scream on his pillow.

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_A/N: M prompted an extension of Amy/Addison's underwear, after she was wearing it in another drabble. Yeah. As M herself would say, reviews are warmly welcomed and always appreciated._


End file.
